Three-dimensional (3D) printing is any process used to manufacture a 3D object. For example, material may be deposited sequentially by a 3D printer (i.e., print head) to manufacture an object. 3D printers are used, for example, in industrial, educational, and demonstrative applications and are capable of manufacturing large objects as well as nanoscale-size objects. For example, 3D printing is used as a rapid prototyping tool allowing designers to prototype “one-off” objects and to iterate over designs.
Unfortunately, certain 3D printers are inherently slow by fabricating objects voxel-by-voxel and layer-by-layer. Therefore, a reasonably sized object may take a long time to print (i.e., overnight, days, etc.) slowing the design process—such as producing a single iteration per day. This supports that 3D printers used for quick design iteration is not yet entirely optimal. In other disciplines, such as in user interface design, designers achieve a fast and efficient process by iterating from low-fidelity prototyping techniques to high-fidelity techniques.
In order to allow designers to iterate quickly, low-fidelity techniques, such as sketching and paper prototyping, give priority to speed over functionality. This trade-off pays off in the early phases of design because it encourages the quick exploration of several versions before committing further resources, eventually leading to a better design.
Certain personal fabrication methods include newly proposed interfaces for a wide variety of prototype applications, for example, Printed Optics for optical sensors and display elements, Printing Teddy Bears for fabrication of soft objects for wearable technology, manufacture of free-form audio technology, and Sauron for creation of interactive controllers using a single camera. With these newly proposed interfaces, the traditional workflow remains the same in that users first create a digital model in a CAD program.
In contrast, interactive fabrication systems offer an alternative between user and system control. For instance, ModelCraft allows users to modify physical paper models by annotating directly on the model, CopyCAD allows users to copy geometry from existing objects using a milling machine, and a constructable interactive fabrication system allows users to directly draw on the work-piece inside a laser cutter using a handheld laser pointer. Different approaches try to reduce 3D printing time by either massively parallelizing the printing process using multiple heads or by assembling objects layer-wise from prefabricated voxels of equal size.
According to the typical traditional workflow, a 3D model is printed using slow hi-fidelity fabrication. In contrast low-fidelity fabrication prints all intermediate versions using fast low-fidelity fabrication creating prototype previews. Only at the end of the design process, when the design is finished, the complete 3D model is printed using hi-fidelity fabrication.
One low-fidelity fabrication approach is known as “faBrickation”. This approach limits the 3D printing process to regions where high-resolution is required and substitutes less crucial portions of a 3D model with Lego-style bricks. Unfortunately, faBrickation requires manual assembly of the bricks, effectively trading in printing time for manual effort.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved 3D printing low-fidelity approach that is fully automated for fast fabrication of 3D objects. More specifically, there is a need for 3D printing of wireframe structures, which may be useful as prototypes enabling designers to preview designs for validation of a 3D model. The invention satisfies these needs.